Death Anxiety

Twenty-five years after 9/11, I am writing about that morning for the first time: the fear, helplessness, waiting, and grief for a future we thought we were promised. At 26, I had no words for what I was experiencing as I watched the world change from my sofa. Today, I am a thanatologist with the vocabulary to understand mortality salience, collective mourning, and shattered assumptive worlds—and to sit beside that young woman and comfort her.

Latin for “remember you must die,” memento mori is not a threat, not a warning shouted from the shadows, but a quiet companion that walks beside us, placing a gentle hand on the shoulder and asking us to really notice the fragile, fleeting fact of being alive. It is a philosophical and artistic tradition that does something rather radical in a culture like ours: it insists that mortality awareness does not have to arrive wrapped in panic. Memento Mori, "To This Favour" 1879 W

What happens to us physically and mentally when death becomes real

Death is not frightening simply because it happens. It is frightening because we know it will happen to us.

I was reviewing my copy of Metcalf and Huntington's Celebrations of Death in preparation for the social media post for Chapter 3 "Symbolic Associations of Death", and I was captivated once again by the discussion on fermentation and the parallels with decomposition in funeral rituals in some parts of Southeast Asia. This is a particular kind of association that only develops when people live close to decay. Not the kind of decay imagined in horror films or managed out of sigh